Global visibility of Asian universities’ Open Access institutional repositories

This paper highlights the current state of open access repositories of Asian universities. It describes their characteristics in terms of types, contents, disciplines, language, technical and operational issues, and policy.

The web performance of Asian institutional repositories as reflected through global visibility and impact of the repositories in Open Directory of Open Access Repository (OpenDOAR), is also examined; as well as the performance of Asian top-ranked universities in the archiving and sharing their research output through institutional repositories, based on the Ranking Web of World Repositories (RWWR).

Findings signify Japan as the biggest contributor of Asian repositories, followed by India and Taiwan. An investigation of the status of these universities revealed that out of the 191 Asian organizational institutional repositories identified in this study, only 48 are listed in the Top 400 RWWR.

This implies that only 12% of Asian institutional repositories are visible and incorporate good practices in their web publication as extracted from the quantitative webometrics indicators used by the ranking. Out of these 48 institutions, 29 are among the Asian Top 200 universities.

However, only 14 of these 29 universities were ranked top 100 in the RWWR. It is revealed that some of the top ranked universities in Asia are not actively contributing to the open access movement.

It is suggested that if the web performance of an institutional repository of a research institution is below the expected position, the university authorities should reconsider their web policy to increase the volume and quality of their intellectual output / research publications through institutional repositories.

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=957

Librarians’ role as change agents for i…

Librarians’ role as change agents for institutional repositories: A case of Malaysian academic libra :

“The primary reason for establishing an institutional repository is to increase the visibility of the institution’s research output by making it Open Access. Academic libraries are becoming very involved in managing electronic scholarly products and participating in the evolving scholarly communication process through institutional repositories. Although institutional repositories can make room for easier access to universities’ research output, unfortunately it is not fully developed in some academic institutions. The origin of this problem is that there are known instances where librarians in-charge of institutional repository are unaware of their roles, and are unskilled in implementing the institutional repository. This paper describes a study conducted on the roles of librarians in the deployment and content recruitment of institutional repositories in eight (8) universities in Malaysia. Sample for this study are librarians who are involved with the development and implementation of institutional repository in their respective universities. The study reveals that the act of collecting materials for depositing is mainly done by librarians rather than the authors and researchers. Providing training sessions, holding meetings in departments and faculties, and also linking of the institutional repository website from the university and faculties’ website have the highest rank in librarians’ approach to promote the institutional repository. The paper also discusses the process of depositing, motivation factors, roles, marketing and benefits of institutional repository that will have reference value for the librarians who desire to embark on an institutional repository.”

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=961

Web Services for Bibliometrics

Institutional repositories have spread in universities where they provide services for recording, distributing, and preserving the institution’s intellectual output. When the Lausanne “academic server”, named SERVAL, was launched at the end of 2008, the Faculty of Biology and Medicine addressed from the outset the issue of quality of metadata. Accuracy is fundamental since research funds are allocated on the basis of the statistics and indicators provided by the repository. The Head of faculty also charged the medical library to explore different ways to measure and assess the research output. The first step for the Lausanne university medical library was to implement the PubMed and the Web of Science web services to easily extract clean bibliographic information from the databases directly into the repository.

Now the medical library is testing other web services (from CrossRef, Web of Science, etc.) to generate quantitative data on research impact mainly. The approach is essentially based on citation linking. Although the utility of citation and bibliometric evaluation is still debated, the most prevalent output measures used for research evaluation are still those based on citation analysis. Even when a new scientific evaluation indicator is proposed, such as h-index, we can always see its link with citation. Additionally, the results of a new indicator are often compared with citation analysis. The presentation will review the web services which might be used in institutional repositories to collect and aggregate citation information for the researchers’ publications.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00540289/fr/

The Role of Institutional Repositories i…

The Role of Institutional Repositories in addressing Higher Education Challenges :

“Over the last decade, Higher Education around the world is facing a number of challenges. Challenges such as adopting new technologies, improving the quality of learning and teaching, widening participation, student retention, curriculum design/alignment, student employability, funding and the necessity to improve governance are considered particularly in many literature. To effectively operate and to survive in this globalization era, Higher Education institutions need to respond those challenges in an efficient way. This paper proposes ways in which institutional data repositories can be utilized to address the challenges found in different literature. Also we discuss which repositories can be shared across the institutions and which need not to be shared in order to address those challenges. Finally the paper discusses the barriers to sharing Higher Education repositories and how those barriers can be addressed.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21694/

Enhancing Institutional Repositories (IR…

Enhancing Institutional Repositories (IR) in Ghana:

“Academic and Research libraries in Ghana have difficulty accessing research work done in their institutions and in Ghana as a whole. This is a challenge in supporting teaching, learning, research and knowledge dissemination. Therefore, an alternative solution can be to enhance the Open Access Institutional repositories (OA- IR). The technology is currently new in Ghana with only one university hosting it. This article provides an overview of the establishment of OA- IRs in Ghana, the challenges and making a case for key decision makers to consider ways in setting up and enhancing their institutional repositories.”
URL : http://dspace.knust.edu.gh/dspace/handle/123456789/1926

Institutional Repositories: an Internal …

Institutional Repositories: an Internal and External Perspective on the Value of IRs for Researchers’ Communities :

“Institutional repositories represent extremely innovative technology, but repository managers still struggle to bring together a critical mass of content and to demonstrate their overall impact on research. In this paper I propose a set of Performance Indicators (PIs) to assess institutional repositories’ success. Fourteen internal indicators are selected and inserted in the quadruple ‘balanced scorecard’ perspective. Three more indicators from an external perspective are then proposed and discussed by the author.
I hope that this study will foster the development of standard Performance Indicators for IRs in the very near future, in order to help IR managers to demonstrate their repositories’ cost-effectiveness and success.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2010-2/index.html?000503

The Economists Online Subject Repository…

The Economists Online Subject Repository—Using Institutional Repositories as the Foundation For International Open Access Growth :

“A new subject repository, Economists Online (EO), has recently been launched. The pioneering model upon which it is built, aggregating the subject specific content of a consortium of participating institutions and their repositories, is examined in this article. An overview of existing subject repositories is given, along with an analysis of the scholarly communications landscape in economics and how the new EO subject repository fits into this environment. This paper makes a case for collaboration between institutional repositories as a way of increasing Open Access (OA) access to research.”

URL : http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a928292729~frm=titlelink